The Man With the Golden Arm (9 page)

The question wakened Rumdum. He rose, stretched his flanks, licked the cat tolerantly while it arched its back in feigned fright, and shuffled into the dim blue gleam cast by the juke box’s dreaming glow.

Frankie felt a choking sensation as he surveyed this scandalous-looking freak. The dog was both bloated and ravenous-looking.

‘He’s a real pedigreed, Frankie,’ Sparrow asserted, reading Frankie’s dismay, ‘a Polish airedale, sort of,’ n every crawlin’ hair of him mine. I wouldn’t trust him to nobody but you.’

‘I’ll say he’s a pedigreed – a pedigreed trampo. I couldn’t keep a brewery horse like that unless I want to go to work days too.’

‘He’ll bring back empties, Frankie. I got him trained how to do it.’ He whistled softly and the dog ambled toward him, one blear red eye showing like a warning signal in a fog – Frankie felt the cold and dripping nose shoved into his hand and heard the great hound break wind discreetly, then hiccough apologetically.

‘Here, beauty,’ Sparrow ordered, and crouched with an empty in his hand for the hound to retrieve. Rumdum got the bottle securely between his jaws and lurched dutifully about in an erratic circle, like a circus pony with a fixed idea, for Frankie’s admiration.

‘He’s one fourt’ retriever is why he does that so good,’ the punk explained.

‘Yeh.’ N three fourths stewbum,’ Frankie added. ‘He thinks he’s earnin’ a drink on the house.’

‘That ain’t nothin’ to be
ashamed
of, is it?’ Sparrow reproached him.

‘Maybe if he had a home he’d settle down,’ Frankie guessed hopefully.

‘Maybe if I did I would too,’ Sparrow agreed wistfully, thinking of the Division Street kennel he called a room. Although he had abandoned his dog-stealing racket, save for an occasional foray ‘just to keep in shape,’ that room still smelled of the transients it had sheltered in the days before he had met Frankie. The room still held an assortment of secondhand dog collars, stolen dog tags, moldy muzzles and greasy leashes.

He remembered; while Rumdum went around and around, breaking wind politely with every step.

All it took, in the old days, to place an order with Sparrow for anything from a Pekingese to a sled dog was a fifty-cent deposit. ‘It ain’t that your credit ain’t red-hot wit’ me,’ he apologized to a client, ‘it’s all account of the hamburger shortage. You say you want to buy me a drink?’

He had never wheedled more than two shots out of a customer before he’d be on his casual way to the nearest hamburger stand. It had never occurred to the punk to go to a butchershop. ‘What’s the hamburg stands for then? Besides, I like the fresh-ground kind myself. Leave the onions off one.’ He was fond of onions himself but had learned that some dogs, particularly chows, disdained them. Toward dark he would start tiptoeing down alleys, his eyes just over the back-yard fences and the single onionless hamburger in his hand.

‘I knew the alleys pretty good when I had my dog-stealin’ route,’ he told Frankie now, ‘I knew all the best windows, them days,’ n the quick short cuts to get there, account I run a peepin’-tom route before I caught on to how to snatch hounds. That’s how I got to know the yards that had dogs in ’em ’n the ones that just had signs sayin’ they did but they really didn’t.’

He would unlatch a gate quietly in the violet twilight and silently permit the hound to start snooping anxiously for the hamburger’s scent. One glance would tell him whether the
hound was bribable: he had yet to meet man or dog that wasn’t. The animal’s snout would trail the meat around the corner and up to the very door of the drafty old five-story frame tenement he called home.

Coaxed five flights up, an amiable puppy could be scooped up like a tired baby and softly encouraged to forget his past. But Sparrow had never forgiven the cynical, double-crossing spitz that had consumed three whole hamburgers, pickle and all, before he’d gotten it forty feet off its home grounds – then had sunk its teeth in his hand and set up a hysterical barking as if Sparrow had bitten it, bringing its mistress onto the punk’s heels. He’d spent that night in the Saloon Street Station booked for dog theft until Record Head had advised the woman to drop charges and Sparrow to ‘stay in the light where we can see what you’re up to after this.’

Sparrow had planned to poison the dog’s mistress after that one; but had ultimately contented himself with poisoning the spitz.

Once inside the room, any hound, regardless of pedigree, had become half drugged by the odors of the hundred breeds that had preceded him there. That close little room had never lost the special smell of shanghaied dogflesh: the captives had snuggled down on the shedded hair of some wayward collie to snooze like lotus-eaters. Sparrow would remove the collar and tag, substitute a less incriminating one and go for the shears. By dint of ingenuous hair clipping, a daub of black paint there and daub of white there, French poodles had come to impersonate ‘Cocky Spaniards’ and Irish pointers had become ‘daubered-up pinchers.’

A two-month-old poodle would waken looking like a debauched terrier: adhesive over a telltale marking on the left foot, dark circles under the eyes and the tip of one ear in the sink. Such a betrayed pup had passed for any breed the market might demand.

Sparrow had sold them, crossbred them, clipped their tails until each had emerged, no matter how many mongrel strains had brought him forth, a ‘pedigreed blood-typed turo-breed.’

His masterpiece, the unholy freak now making circles in the hope of a short beer, was a cross between ‘an English sheepy ’n a Division Street beagle – only I call him a square-snapper for short. What he’s best for is catchin’ squirrels ’n shakin’ the dirty walnuts out of ’em,’ the punk explained earnestly. ‘In his native hab’tat you got to have a dog like this if you’re out to pick up a sack of walnuts. But the trouble is he’s just trained to chase them one kind of squirrels ’n they’re gettin’ kind of rare over here account of the climate changin’ so fast. So he don’t have nothin’ to do but hang around taverns ’n wait for the climate to change back a little.’

Certainly Rumdum was the luckiest hound in Chicago. For he alone, of all the city’s countless dogs, had received Professor Saltskin’s postgraduate course in square-snapping. He had studied at the feet of the philosophers who lounged out their lives on the curb in front of the Tug & Maul waiting for a live one. He had earned his degree by snapping suspiciously at all uniformed toilers: mailmen, milkmen, Good Humor men on bicycles, streetcar conductors and anyone carrying a lunch bucket – everyone, indeed, who didn’t smell of beer or unemployment. Rumdum could tell a square with nostrils so clogged he had once mistaken molasses for beer.

‘He got a degree what I call D.D.S. – Doctor of Dirty Square-snapping,’ Sparrow liked to boast. ‘Here’s a dog got a better start in life than most humans. I named him Rumdum when he was two mont’s old ’n told him straight out, “I ain’t givin’ you no water ’cause I don’t want to raise you prej’diced against somethin’ better.” Too many dogs get offsteered onto water right off, they don’t get no chance to make up their own minds what they really like best, beer ’r water ’r just
plain whisky. The people should let a helpless beast make up his own opinions, otherwise it’s croolty to our weak-minded friends, like takin’ advantage of little birds, they ain’t even learned how to fly yet. Today you could put Rummy in the bat’tub ’n he keeps his dirty snout up so’s he don’t have to taste that other stuff.

‘But he ain’t the kind to just beg beers off you ’n then go to sleep on you. Rummy, he’s a natural entertainer, he pays his own way – look – he’s dizzy but he’s still in there’ – Sparrow reached over and set the hound to circling in the opposite direction, which for some reason caused the dog to begin breaking wind again.

‘You wouldn’t hire no M.C. if you was needin’ a detective, would you? Well, Rumdum’s field is strictly entertainment. He don’t guard no cash register. He don’t even howl when somebody’s gonna croak. He just hiccups. He don’t care whether his hair is smood down or not, he don’t care how he looks or what becomes of him. He don’t even bark. He just whines when the brew’ry truck guys come to take back the empties, account he don’t know they’re empty. He figures they’re takin’ away all the beer in the world ’n there won’t be enough left for him. He sure looks sad when they do that on him. I tell him, “Look the other way, Rummy,” when I see ’em comin’. But he peeks ’n then that tail droops.’

‘He don’t bark is right,’ Frankie agreed. ‘He won’t even bark at a cat. I seen Antek’s deaf tom tree him wit’ my own eyes.’

‘Let’s face facts, Frankie,’ Sparrow protested. ‘It wasn’t no tree. He just jumped up on the bar to avoid a disturbment was all. He knew it wouldn’t look dignified, a big fat hound like him lickin’ a poor skinny little old deaf-’n-dumb cat. That dog got real pride, Frankie. He won’t fight out of his weight when there’s no principle involved.’

‘If there’s no bowl of beer involved, you mean. That’s the
only time I ever seen him show his teeth – when somebody took his dirty beer away.’

‘He got no teet’,’ Sparrow reminded Frankie, ‘they got dissolved in beer bubbles.’

‘You better start him the other way round again,’ Frankie suggested.

But Rumdum had given out, with one final windbreaking roar. He dropped the bottle at Frankie’s feet and stood looking up for a refill, his great bloodshot eyes swimming in the melancholy hope that only chronic alcoholics know.

‘He thinks you’re the bartender ’cause you got on a tie,’ Sparrow explained.

‘Take him up to the room,’ Frankie ordered, ‘I got to case out of here.’

Sparrow took off his glasses to see Frankie better. ‘Can’t I case out wit’ you, Frankie? Where you goin’?’ He hadn’t been left out of any fast hustle of Frankie’s since they’d been together. ‘Maybe I could help like before.’

‘Do like I said.’ Frankie’s knuckles shown whitely where he pressed them to his temples.

‘I don’t get what you’re salty about,’ Sparrow began – then gathered up Rumdum in both arms and shuffled out past Louie and Blind Pig.

‘The dealer ain’t hisself, that Zosh is stonin’ him too hard,’ he decided. ‘I’ll have to speak to her.’ Yet Frankie had been stoned up there before, hard and often, and had always been able to forget it in the back booth at Antek’s. ‘He don’t act like the booze helps him no more,’ Sparrow realized.

He waited in Frankie’s doorway, with the hound whining against his legs, without knowing just what he was waiting for. Frankie had told him what to do, it was up to him to do it.

As he turned toward the stairs he saw Frankie heading across the street toward the Safari.

Behind him Blind Pig waited on the curb for someone, anyone, to help him across.

Inadvertently Sparrow looked around for Fomorowski.

The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie’s Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies’ dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood.

Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. For Nifty Louie paid the rent and Frankie knew too well who the landlord was. He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. Frankie remembered that face, ravaged by love of its own suffering as by some endless all-night orgy. A face forged out of his own wound fever in a windy ward tent on the narrow Meuse. He had met Private McGantic before: both had served their country well.

This was the fellow who looked somehow a little like everyone else in the world and was more real to a junkie than any real man could ever be. The projected image of one’s own pain when that pain has become too great to be borne. The image of one hooked so hopelessly on morphine that there would be no getting the monkey off without another’s help. There are so few ways to help old sad frayed and weary West Side junkies.

Frankie felt no pity for himself, yet felt compassion for this McGantic. He worried, as the sickness rose in himself, about what in God’s name McGantic would do tomorrow when the money and the morphine both gave out. Where then, in that terrible hour, would Private M. find the strength to carry the monkey through one more endless day?

By the time Frankie got inside the room he was so weak Louie had to help him onto the army cot beside the oil stove. He lay on his back with one arm flung across his eyes as if in shame; and his lips were blue with cold. The pain had hit him with an icy fist in the groin’s very pit, momentarily tapering off to a single probing finger touching the genitals to get the maximum of pain. He tried twisting to get away from the finger: the finger was worse than the fist. His throat was so dry that, though he spoke, the lips moved and made no sound. But Fomorowski read such lips well.

‘Fix me. Make it stop. Fix me.’

‘I’ll fix you, Dealer,’ Louie assured him softly.

Louie had his own bedside manner. He perched on the red leather and chrome bar stool borrowed from the Safari, with the amber toes of his two-tone shoes catching the light and the polo ponies galloping down his shirt. This was Nifty Louie’s Hour. The time when he did the dealing and the dealer had to take what Louie chose to toss him in Louie’s own good time.

He lit a match with his fingertip and held it away from the bottom of the tiny glass tube containing the fuzzy white cap of morphine, holding it just far enough away to keep the cap from being melted by the flame. There was time and time and lots of time for that. Let the dealer do a bit of melting first; the longer it took the higher the price. ‘You can pay me off when Zero pays you,’ he assured Frankie. There was no hurry. ‘You’re good with me any time, Dealer.’

Frankie moaned like an animal that cannot understand its own pain. His shirt had soaked through and the pain had frozen so deep in his bones nothing could make him warm again.

‘Hit me, Fixer. Hit me.’

A sievelike smile drained through Louie’s teeth. This was his hour and this hour didn’t come every day. He snuffed out
the match’s flame as it touched his fingers and snapped the head of another match into flame with his nail, letting its glow flicker one moment over that sieve-like smile; then brought the tube down cautiously and watched it dissolve at the flame’s fierce touch. When the stuff had melted he held both needle and tube in one hand, took the dealer’s loose-hanging arm firmly with the other and pumped it in a long, loose arc. Frankie let him swing it as if it were attached to someone else. The cold was coming
up
from within now: a colorless cold spreading through stomach and liver and breathing across the heart like an odorless gas. To make the very brain tighten and congeal under its icy touch.